3 Tips When Optimising Mobile Traffic

Thursday, 13 June 2013

Optimising for mobile is a must for anyone in PPC nowadays. But it is important that you don’t get swept up too much in the hype without doing your homework!

Across desktops, Google dominates with 83% total market share followed by Yahoo (7%), Bing (5%), Baidu (4%) and Ask (1%) making up the top 5. However when you look at market share for moile devices you can see that Google has a much larger share with 92% and Yahoo is the only other engine to hold on to some of its market share well.

Now this will have been driven by the rise of smartphone sales and tablet sales. Coupled with Google being most users default search engine on those devices. However, it is important to look beyond the user stats and understand how mobiles can work for your brand. There are 3 main areas to consider:

1. Site compatibility
A fairly straightforward one but your site needs to function on a mobile device if you’re looking to optimise for that traffic. Most tablets run desktop sites fine but it’s worth checking out the experience for yourself. The same goes for mobile, how well can people navigate your site? If you were going to make a purchase, can you do it easily? You may not need to run out and build a mobile site from day one, have a look at your analytics, are people using mobile devices to get to your site already? If so, identify what they are doing, it may be that you can create 2 or 3 mobile pages to satisfy the needs of most visitors. Eg. Directions, contact details etc.

2. Quality of users
Always look at how people are interacting with the site on mobile devices. Look at the bounce rate and see what pages they get to the site on. If users are converting already, what’s consistent with their journeys, are they just buying 1 or 2 products or is it varie?. Look for patterns on where users have had a successful journey on site and where they haven’t. Then drive traffic towards journeys that work and improve the experience where it’s needed.

3. Performance by market
Every country has a different mobile adoption rate. Japan, China and South Korea are generally more advanced users of mobile devices than the west and can find their way around sites easily. However, they also expect sites to be compatible – so be prepared. A good indication is to use analytics to understand the revenue per visit on mobile devices. This will help you show where the potential is at a country level and help you divert your spend accordingly. Don’t be afraid to opt out of markets that are less profitable, even if traffic is high. Make the most of your budget to get a return and work on improving the quality of users from other markets as a longer term strategy